Scope Scars
While working in Norway in the early 2000s, I visited Gassco who were based on an island near Haugesund, accessible by ferry from Stavanger. When I arrived, my contact there greeted me with a perfectly circular cut around three quarters of his blackened right eye.
“I’ve got a new rifle” he explained, “It kicks back kinda hard. It’s a rangefinder cut”. We agreed that “Scope Scar” was a better name, and I reckon he still calls it that.
I passed comment a couple of weeks ago on the fallacy of Scope 3 accountability for gas producers. If you’ll permit me the vanity of quoting myself:
“Perhaps the clearest indicator of the singular fascination with emissions is the push for accountability for so-called Scope 3 emissions. For the uninitiated, a simplified model is Scope 1 are your direct emissions, Scope 2 are emissions associated with the things you buy, Scope 3 are emissions associated with what people do with the things you sell.
I can’t pass my speeding ticket to Ford because they built a car capable of breaking the speed limit. I can’t sue Johnny Walker for my headache this morning… If I shot someone, I couldn’t blame Smith and Wesson. So why is there this attempt to hold producers to account for what customers do?”
Ben from South Australia has asked me to expand on this point. For you, sir, it would be my pleasure.
Let’s imagine that a clutch of carbon atoms (along with their hydrogen atom friends) are released from underground captivity from the Haynesville shale in East Texas, hurled down a pipeline where they arrive, dizzy from the compression, at a gulf coast liquefaction facility. All of a sudden, our new friends are colder than Dallas in February 2021, and are swimming on someone else’s ship.
So far so (realtively) easy - we can quantify what’s happened and attribute emissions. This is scope 1 and 2. But now our mates are on someone else’s LNG carrier, and their career options are greatly expanded.
The ship owners may lose control of their vapour system and these poor souls are lost at sea (25 point penalty). They may be re-liquefied (accruing more emissions), or put to work in the ship engine.
After offloading, they may be reloaded, reliquefied, or revapourised… after which they may be ripped apart and sent back underground (blue hydrogen), Haber nice day making ammonia (explosives for mining Teslas or fertiliser for, y’know, feeding half the world) or simply be burned in the boiling of your kettle or the production of power.
All of these actions are the consequences (and scope 1 emissions) of others. Expecting a producer to account for all of this would just create a cottage industry producing nothing but hot air.
This position is sometimes denigrated by referring to it as the big tobacco defence - that the producers of cigarettes claimed they were not responsible for the health effects to people smoking them.
This counterpoint overlooks the lawsuits that led to the then-record fines levied against the tobacco companies, and the reasons why they finally settled. The suits were targeting the actions of these companies in targeting under aged smokers: there was overwhelming evidence that the brand of cigarette that someone smoked first would become their lifelong choice. Gaining market share therefore meant targeting kids.
Yes, there was also some sharing of information that suggested that the health costs were not as high as the increasingly damning scientific caseload demonstrated. The response to this was the ever-increasing and gruesome labelling of cigarette packages with health warnings.
Let’s try applying this to climate. Some accusations attest that big oil ‘knew’ in the 80s that emissions were causing climate change. I find this incredulous as most climate claims are based on modelling, and anyone who remembers using computers in the 80s knows that they were a long, long way from being capable of modelling anything so complex.
Fun fact: there was a particularly short-sighted Exxon executive who infamously said “I cannot foresee the day that every Exxon employee has a computer on their desk”.
Correlations are not causation, and the body of evidence at the time did not bear any relation to the black lungs of smokers. Even now - as I’ve spoken of previously, the IPCC is still reporting significant uncertainties.
No one in the gas industry is trying to get kids hooked on hydrocarbons. That said, I’ve no issue with transparency - perhaps the annual report of a producer could say “If fully combusted, the products would yield xxx tonnes of CO2”.
More like a warning: here’s some (regulated) information, now make your own decision.
Not so much a scope. More of a rangefinder.
AB